So far, much of the news you’ve reported out of Sochi has concerned the inadequacy of your lodgings. Apparently, before you left on your Olympics assignment, you didn’t get the memo: Life and work assignments in non-Western countries can be a challenge.

I know that my fellow Mideast correspondents, not to mention the refugees we meet from places like Syria and Iraq, can concur that having to make do with the same hotel shampoo for two days running is unacceptable. We also would dearly love if that were the leading item on the list of why our jobs and lives are hard.

A faulty fire alarm at 5 a.m.? Well, look on the bright side: your hotel has a working fire alarm. At the hotels in Baghdad where the journalist corps lived after the U.S. invasion in 2003, the alarms we worried about were for fire fights raging outside on the street.

As Twitter complaints from Sochi have gone viral, colleagues who work in developing countries have exchanged Facebook posts of bewilderment as to why in the world anyone would complain about the plethora of choice that the two-toilet room provides?

In Afghanistan, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, or even after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, many of us Western journalists went for weeks without a shower, let alone the sight of porcelain, dirty or clean, and made do instead with open air latrines. The majority of people I have interviewed in my 14 years as a foreign correspondent from Central Asia, Africa and the Arab world have never had the luxury of indoor plumbing altogether.

But, dear comrades, even if you are not used to traveling to war zones or natural disasters, didn’t you understand when you opened your airline boarding pass on your smart phone that your temporary home during the Olympics used to be part of the Soviet Union, a place historically ridiculed–rightly or wrongly–for a lack of Western conveniences and dated infrastructure, not to mention antiquated customer service?

As a student who lived in Khabarovsk in the Soviet Far East during my study abroad program in 1991, I understood that all travelers to Russia should bring their own medicine, syringes, towels and toiletries, as most of the country was surviving on ration cards for everything from tea to bananas to meat.

And in those pre-Internet days, there was no way to communicate with anyone outside of Russia without dialing a landline phone to Moscow, ordering an international call and waiting for the operator to call you back–sometimes after a delay of 3 hours–with an open line.

On a beach holiday to Sochi in 1999, I had a week of sunshine but absolutely no hot water, because, as in Soviet times, every city in the still newly independent Russia turned off the centralized system of municipal pipes for a month in the summer to clean from them the yellow guck and hard minerals that so many of you have posted as part of your Sochi complaints. Mind you, I didn’t get a hotel discount for the privilege of a cold shower every morning. Russian travelers understood that was normal. Foolish me for not asking about that ahead of time.

Finally, comrades, don’t think for a minute that those of us in the know haven’t noticed the glaring lack of Twitter diatribes about the abundance of alcohol in Russia that can help you drown your sorrows or deepen your grudges against those providing your hospitality for the next three weeks. The last time I checked, a cheap bottle of vodka was only about $5.50. Beer, meanwhile, is still licensed as a soft drink, meaning that many choices are as cheap as a Coke. Paris and London can’t match that.

As for ice for your drink? Understand that Russians rarely use ice–and then see if you can’t manage to get some of Sochi’s manufactured snow back with you from your Olympics assignment each evening.

And then ask any Russian you can find to show you the old-fashioned way to crack open your bottle with your teeth or a cabinet corner. That should be a cultural experience worthy of a new Twitter hash tag.

Comments (5 of 28)

See, Margaret, let me explain something. The Olympics are not supposed to be identical to a war-torn hell hole in the Middle East. Your analogy is flawed.

9:43 pm February 7, 2014

Mike wrote:

As a global correspondent for 20-years, I can't believe how whiny my industry has become. Come on people, the OLYMPICS are for the Athletes and the Competition, not a 5-star hotel for news correspondents! Grow up, and stop your dribble.

9:31 pm February 7, 2014

Doesn't matter wrote:

This pseudo article is full of bias and intellectual dishonesty!

You can not justify low standards and sloppiness just because "it has been like that since the fall of Soviet Union". Why don't you go live in a cave and harvest fruits from trees, just because men used to do that?

Two-toilet rooms are good? I'm sure most people enjoy watching others doing stuff there at the same time as they do. Or maybe it's so one can puke in one toilet while you sit on the other.

All the reported problems result from typical low class Russian worker slackness (low paid, I guess). They don't care, don't want to do it well, just care about the money to have enough food and alcohol.

Seriously, why was this even published? It seems written by a teenage-minded person.

PS: I lived in Moscow for 7 weeks and living conditions were not superb at all (but acceptable... you end up lowering your standards after a while, anyway); it was a students' dormitory of a state university, not a hotel. This is why all these reports actually do not surprise me at all, and since I have been in 'western standardized' houses in Western Europe, I can actually understand the complaints of the reporters. And yes, THEY HAVE A POINT about LIVING STANDARDS IN RUSSIA BEING LOW!
_

9:29 pm February 7, 2014

Doesn't matter wrote:

This pseudo article is full of bias and intellectual dishonesty!

You can not justify low standards and sloppiness just because "it has been like that since the fall of Soviet Union". Why don't you go live in a cave and harvest fruits from trees, just because men used to do that?

Two-toilet rooms are good? I'm sure most people enjoy watching others doing stuff there at the same time as they do. Or maybe it's so one can puke in one toilet while you sit on the other.

All the reported problems result from typical low class Russian worker slackness (low paid, I guess). They don't care, don't want to do it well, just care about the money to have enough food and alcohol.

Seriously, why was this even published? It seems written by a teenage-minded person.

PS: I lived in Moscow for 7 weeks and living conditions were not superb at all (but acceptable... you end up lowering your standards after a while, anyway); it was a students' dormitory of a state university, not a hotel. This is why all these reports actually do not surprise me at all, and since I have been in 'western standardized' houses in Western Europe, I can actually understand the complaints of the reporters. And yes, THEY HAVE A POINT about LIVING STANDARDS IN RUSSIA BEING LOW!

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